systems 📡

the worst of all possible worlds: generative AI manages to pollute the internet with cheap synthetic data, manages to make being a human artist / creator harder

The illusion persists because there’s so much money in it. Back in 2016, Ben Thompson wrote that Google’s AI efforts were at odds with its business model: “If a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its advertise... See more

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing. Parasocia... See more

A sense of dread as I see this. We are slowly seeing the end of the open web. - AI search powered experiences take away clicks from high quality publishers in aggregate + - Crawlbots from AI companies not playing by the rules leading to - High quality publishers are looking to get paid *now* for "the value of their data" to compensate for traffi... See more

In this world, with content as a supreme cultural value, it’s better for something to be interesting than ethically sound. Widespread attention bestows an aura; becoming content is how reality is made real.

A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. Thus, when we describe a language, we should pay particular attention to the means that the language provides for combining simple ideas to form more compl... See more